Ultimate Safari by Nadine Gordimer
The Ultimate Safari | Introduction
Nadine Gordimer’s short story ‘‘The Ultimate
Safari,’’ first published in Great Britain’s literary publication Granta in
1989, and later included in her 1991 collection, Jump and Other Stories,
follows the story of an unnamed narrator and her family as they leave their
Mozambique village for a refugee camp across the border in South Africa. In an
unrecorded talk she gave at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1991, Gordimer attributed the inspiration
for the story to a visit she made to a camp for Mozambique refugees. The socalled
‘‘bandits’’ alluded to by the story’s main character and narrator are,
presumably, members of Renamo, the Mozambique rebel group that tried for years,
with the clandestine support of South Africa, to overthrow Mozambique’s Marxist
government. By the time the events of this story take place, liberation
movements in countries across Africa had long since swept whites from power,
with South Africa
being the single exception. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in an attempt to
protect itself and its white power structure, the South African government
supported the destabilization efforts of rebels in its black-controlled,
neighboring countries by financing armed incursions and raids, such as the ones
that the narrator describes in the story.
‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ like nearly all of Gordimer’s work,
addresses the effects South Africa’s system of apartheid had on its people and
its neighbors. Published in book form the year she was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature, the story continues Gordimer’s long-standing efforts to gauge
the effects of apartheid by delving into the minds of characters of all races
and genders; in this case, Gordimer takes on the persona and adopts the voice
of a young black Mozambique girl to narrate the family’s arduous trek through
Kruger Park and to the refugee camp.
The Ultimate Safari | Author Biography
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa on November 20, 1923 to Isidore
Gordimer, an immigrant Jewish watchmaker, and Nan Myers, who had immigrated to South Africa from Great Britain as a young child. The
younger of two girls, Gordimer led a solitary life growing up due to a
prognosis, at the age of 10, of heart problems. As a result of her condition,
Gordimer’s mother put an end to her daughter’s strenuous activities, including
dancing lessons, pulled her out of the convent school she had been attending,
and a hired a tutor for her for three hours a day. From the ages of 11 to 16,
Gordimer had very little contact with children of her own age and spent most of
her time either with her parents or alone.
Although Gordimer would later describe the severe loneliness
she experienced during those years, she used her time to read and write
voraciously, and at the age of 13, she published her first short story in the Johannesburg
Sunday Express. By the time Gordimer was 16, she stopped being tutored
entirely, and except for a year of general studies at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
in 1945, Gordimer never took another class of formal education.
In 1949, the year following the election of South Africa’s
National Party—the political party that would formalize South Africa’s system
of racial segregation, or apartheid—Gordimer published her first collection of
short stories, Face to Face, and a few years later, in 1953, her first
novel, The Lying Days, was published.
In 1949, Gordimer married Gerald Gavron (also known as
Gavronsky), and in 1950 her daughter, Oriane, was born. Gordimer and Gavron
divorced in 1952. In 1954, Gordimer married the German art dealer, Reinhold
Cassirer, with whom she had a son, Hugo. Gordimer and Cassirer remained married
until his death in 2001.
In the fifty years since her first book was published,
Gordimer has published more than 30 novels, short story collections, and
collections of essays that have won numerous awards. Her 1960 collection Friday’s
Footprint and Other Stories won the W. H. Smith Literary Award. Her 1970
novel A Guest of Honor was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The
Conservationist received Great Britain’s
prestigious Booker–McConnell Prize in 1974, as well as South Africa’s
CNA Literary Prize. In 1991, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Also in 1991, Gordimer published Jump and Other Stories, the collection
which includes ‘‘The Ultimate Safari.’’
Long regarded as one of South Africa’s leading political
activists and intellectuals, Gordimer saw many of her books banned in her own
country at the time of their publication due to her stance against the
apartheid policies of the government. All of her books, including her
collection of short stories titled Loot and Other Stories
(2003)—published nearly a decade after apartheid’s official demise—in some way
address apartheid or its effects.
The Ultimate Safari | Summary
‘‘The Ultimate
Safari’’ opens with the narrator’s cryptic and mysterious statement that
tersely sets the tone of the story: ‘‘That night our mother went to the shop and
she didn’t come back. Ever.’’ The narrator of the story, a young black
Mozambican girl, never finds out what happened to her mother, or to her father,
who had also left one day never to return. The presumption, however, is that
both her parents are dead by the time her story unfolds; her people are at war,
and her village has been beset by ‘‘bandits’’ that have left the villagers
destitute and frightened, and all evidence points to those socalled ‘‘bandits’’
as the cause of her parents’ disappearance.
The story that the girl relates is a deceptively simple one:
After losing everything at the hands of the bandits who have repeatedly raided
their village, and in fear of their lives, the girl’s family—her grandmother,
grandfather, and older and younger brothers—set out on a long and arduous trek
through Kruger Park, the popular national reserve in northeast South Africa
that borders Mozambique and has for years been a tourist destination for rich
foreigners wanting the experience of the ultimate African safari.
Along the way, the grandfather, who has been reduced to doing
little more than making ‘‘little noises’’ while rocking ‘‘from side to side,’’
wanders off and is lost in some high grasses and must be left behind. The young
girl recounts how little her family had to eat in the park, despite the aromas
of campfire grills from the park’s tourists. Even the buzzards, she notices,
have more to eat than the refugees. Eventually, the remaining family members,
all of whom remain nameless throughout the story, are led by the grandmother to
a refugee camp where they are given space in a tent in which to live. There the
grandmother eventually ekes out a living carrying bricks while the girl attends
school. At the story’s conclusion, we learn for the first time some of the
basic facts about the girl and her family when ‘‘some white people’’ come to
the camp to film the camp and a reporter interviews the grandmother. For
instance, we learn definitively that the girl and her family are black, that
they are originally from Mozambique,
and that the story has taken place over the course of nearly three years.
‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ is set along the Mozambique–South
African border sometime during the 1980s, at a time when Mozambique was ruled
by a black Marxist government and South Africa was the lone remaining African
country still being run by its minority white population. The ‘‘bandits’’
alluded to by the narrator are members of Renamo, the rebel group supported by
the white South African government whose goal it was to destabilize Mozambique
by pillaging rural villages and causing civil unrest. One of the consequences
of these incursions, or ‘‘raids’’ as the narrator calls them, was a large-scale
exodus by poor villagers from Mozambique
into refugee camps that lined the border between the two countries. Many of
these refugees languished for years in the camp while South Africa
continued its military and economic domination of the region. Some estimates
suggest that the civil war that was fueled by Renamo was responsible for a
million deaths in Mozambique
alone. In 1992, when apartheid was officially abolished and blacks began to
exert control over the South African political structure, the destabilizing
efforts were halted, though the region continues to suffer the consequences of
the years of instability.
The Ultimate Safari | Characters
The Bandits
So called by the government, the bandits raided the
narrator’s village repeatedly, forced her and her family into hiding, and
ultimately forced them into the long trek that takes up most of the story. The
identity of the bandits is never revealed specifically, although they are
presumed to be one of the Mozambique
rebel factions supported by the South African government, trying to overtake
the government by wreaking havoc in the rural areas.
The Daughter
A young girl of nine or ten when the story opens, the
daughter, who is also the story’s narrator, reveals very little about herself,
but it is through her eyes that the story of her and her family’s arduous trek
away from their village to the refugee camp is told. She understands very
little about the war, or the reasons behind it, except to comment about the
fear the bandits have instilled into her people and to describe the effects
their raids have had on her life. An astute observer, she conveys much of the
tone of the story through her descriptions of the trek: her grandfather rocking
to and fro making little noises; flies buzzing on her grandmother’s face; her
older brother becoming silent like their grandfather. Although we ultimately
learn very little about the narrator herself, it is through her descriptions
that the story unfolds.
The Father
Although he never appears in the story, the father’s absence,
and presumed death in the war, is significant as it helps to set the tone of
the story, and without him, the narrator’s family must survive on their own.
The Grandfather
Once the owner of three sheep, a cow, and a vegetable
garden—all of which have been taken away by the bandits by the time the story
takes place—the grandfather does little more than rock side to side and make
little noises in this story. He is clearly suffering from some form of dementia
or the effects of a mental breakdown, and in the course of the trek through Kruger Park,
he wanders off through the high grasses, becomes lost, and must be left behind
by the family.
The Grandmother
As the matriarch of her extended family that includes her
husband and her grandchildren—the narrator, and the narrator’s younger and
older brothers—the grandmother is the strongest adult character in the story.
It is through her vision and leadership that the family is able to escape the
danger wrought by the rebels and travel through Kruger Park
to a refugee camp across the border. Once her family settles into the refugee
camp, she finds work hauling bricks, and she oversees her grandchildren’s
education.
The Little Brother
Less than a year old when the family is forced to leave their
village, the little brother is three when the story ends. In that time he
suffers greatly from malnutrition, and as he grows older, his older sister
notices that he barely speaks, a result, she believes, of having too little
food during their journey.
The Mother
Similar to the father, we know nothing about the mother
except that she left one day for the store and never returned, forcing the
narrator’s grandparents to take over responsibilities for the children during
the war.
The Ultimate Safari | Themes
Apartheid
Between 1948 and 1992, the Republic of South Africa
had an institutionalized system of racial segregation known as
‘‘apartheid’’—the Afrikaner word meaning ‘‘separateness.’’ Effectively
stripping all South African blacks, coloreds, and Indians of their citizenship
rights, apartheid was instrumental in helping whites to maintain power in the
predominantly black country. As countries across Africa
regained their independence from Europeans, the South African government,
fearing the liberating influence of its recently liberated black neighbors on
its own black population, financially and militarily supported the efforts of
rebel groups to destabilize neighboring governments. This desperate measure to
protect the apartheid system and the white control of the South African
economic and political structures resulted in the long-term displacement and
deaths of millions of southern Africans over the years. Nearly all of
Gordimer’s work addresses, in some way, the effects apartheid has had on whites
and blacks alike.
Family
Prior to the events of the story, the narrator had lost both
her father and her mother to the war. Her grandmother and grandfather took over
parenting responsibilities, and when the grandfather lost his only means of
livelihood to the bandits, he suffered from a mental breakdown of some sort,
and the grandmother took over sole responsibility of raising the family. It was
through the commitment of the grandmother to keeping her family together that
the narrator and her siblings were able to trek hundreds of miles across the
wilds of Kruger Park to the relative safety of the
refugee camp.
Homelessness
One of the major effects of the South African policy of
apartheid was the displacement of millions of blacks in the region. In South
Africa itself, where apartheid dictated where blacks were legally allowed to
live, many poor families were forced to live illegally in shanty towns outside
of cities where they hoped to find work, living effectively as homeless people
in corrugated iron shacks and tempo rary structures. In the larger southern
African region, many poor villagers were forced by military incursions financed
by South Africa
to abandon their homes in favor of refugee camps where they lived for years in
desperate conditions. At the end of the story, a white reporter asks the
grandmother if she ever wants to return home. While the young girl dreams of a
day she will be reunited with her mother and grandfather in their home village,
the grandmother responds directly by saying, ‘‘There is nothing. No home.’’
Lawlessness
Even though many countries around the world— particularly in Africa—have successfully liberated themselves from their
European colonial rulers, most of them are still economically and militarily
vulnerable to outside forces. In southern Africa, many of the border areas
surrounding South Africa
were effectively reduced to anarchy and lawlessness by the repeated incursions
by quasi-military groups funded and supported by the South African government.
While some of the military groups had legitimate political issues they were
addressing, most of them were little more than groups of vigilantes whose sole
aim was to destabilize the areas through brutal force that included raids,
pillaging, and military attacks. It was this environment of lawlessness that
finally forced the narrator and her family to make the arduous trek with other
refugee families through Kruger Park and to the refugee camps in South Africa.
Oppression
One of the goals of apartheid was to help whites, who made up
less than 20 percent of the South African population, maintain complete
economic and military control. The effect of their policies was the widespread
oppression of otherwise innocent blacks in both South Africa itself as well as in
the neighboring countries.
Racial Conflict
Apartheid effectively contributed to the complete economic
and political control by whites of the non-white population in and around South Africa
through the institutionalization of race-based classi- fication systems and
laws. Apartheid effectively fueled racist tendencies among the populace, and
one of the effects was the dehumanization, in the eyes of the white
populations, of blacks. Although there is no ‘‘racial conflict’’ per se in
‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ the widespread racial conflicts that the area had been
experiencing for years led to the environment that forced whole families and
villages into desperate living situations. Without that racial con- flict, it
would have been difficult for whites to justify the widespread refugee problem,
and there would have been greater pressures for more humane and peaceful
solutions to the problems South
Africa believed it was facing.
Rites of Passage
The family’s trip through the wilds of Kruger Park
can be viewed allegorically as a rite of passage for the young narrator.
Through the journey, the girl must confront the loss of yet another family
member—her grandfather—and she must take over the parenting responsibilities of
her younger brother whom she must physically support. The narrator, though she
is only 11 years old at the story’s completion and although she still clings to
the naïve hope that she has a home to return to where her grandfather and
mother will be waiting, has begun the process of passing through the rites that
will eventually lead her to womanhood.
Role of Women
In a society ruled by war, the women of the villages were
forced to take over all parenting responsibilities, becoming both the homemaker
and wage earner. In ‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ the burden of this dual
responsibility falls onto the shoulders of the grandmother, who must not only
lead her grandchildren to safety, but who must also take over the care of her
own husband whose dementia has rendered him useless. To a lesser degree, the
narrator must also take over parenting responsibilities by carrying and caring
for her infant brother who begins to grow weak from malnutrition during their
trek.
Warfare
The warfare that the villages experience in the course of
Gordimer’s story is ‘‘guerilla’’ warfare; that is, the Renamo rebels trying to
overthrow the government do so in ways that create instability in the outlying
areas without ever directly confronting the government’s military forces
themselves. Guerilla warfare is an effective military tool for groups of
limited resources, as fewer soldiers are needed to inflict serious damage, and
the psychological effects on the population are far greater than they are
through conventional warfare.
The Ultimate Safari | Style
Diction
Throughout the telling of her story, the narrator of ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’
employs a simple, colloquial diction with sentences that are sparse and
stripped of all ornamentation. In fact, the diction that Gordimer has given the
narrator contributes to the surprise readers may experience upon learning that
the narrator is a black Mozambique
refugee. While the story she tells is consistent with a refugee’s experience,
her diction hints at her being a young white English-speaking girl. There are
no idiomatic expressions, slang phrases, or sentence constructions that hint at
the narrator‘s being black or Mozambican. One effect the girl’s diction has is
to break down the barrier between the non-African white readers and the
narrator: by portraying the girl as being more like her largely white American
and European readers, Gordimer has succeed in creating a more sympathetic
character than would have otherwise been possible.
Dialogue
Although the narrator summarizes conversations she overhears
or is a part of, there is no dialogue to speak of in the story until the final
scene when a filmmaker interviews the grandmother. This technique offers
perhaps a truer representation of how a girl of the narrator’s age would recall
conversations, and it also has the effect of giving the story more of a
dream-like or mythic atmosphere. By not engaging us directly in the
conversations as they happened, the narrator effectively keeps the entire story
in her head, presenting it to us entirely from memory. And even with the small
amount of dialogue at the story’s conclusion, Gordimer chooses not to use
quotation marks to set the dialogue off, giving the story the continued
dream-like effect.
Imagery
Gordimer uses stark, often-violent imagery to help set the
tone of the story and to help us understand the grim circumstances the girl and
her family are facing. The narrator, for instance, begins her description of
entering Kruger Park by telling of a man in her village
who lost his legs to crocodiles, reminding the reader of the dangers lurking
before them and adding to the story’s menacing tone. Once in the park, she
describes the animals surrounding them as being continually on the prowl for
food while she and her family have nothing to eat. ‘‘We had passed [the
vultures] often where they were feeding on the bones of dead animals, nothing
was ever left there for us to eat,’’ she tells readers.
Irony
By giving the story the title, ‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ and
by prefacing it with an epigraph from a London
travel advertisement luring rich tourists to Africa for the ‘‘ultimate
safari,’’ Gordimer is employing irony to underscore the vast differences
between the wealthy, foreign whites and the poor, black refugees that populate
southern Africa. For many people from the
narrator’s village who were forced out of their homes and into Kruger Park
for the arduous journey to the refugee camps, this would certainly be their
‘‘ultimate,’’ or last, ‘‘safari.’’ Many, such as the narrator’s grandfather,
would die in the park itself, and many would ultimately die in the refugee
camp, never able to see their homes again. Meanwhile, as the group travels
through the game reserve that rich European tourists spend thousands of dollars
to visit, the roasting meats of the tourists waft by, and the refugee children
grow hungrier and hungrier, with less even to eat than the buzzards.
Point of View
By employing the first person point of view, and using a
young black refugee girl as the story’s narrator, Gordimer is able to imagine
for herself and for us what it is to be ‘‘the other.’’ Since the story is not
told from a third-person omniscient point of view, the experience of being a
refugee fleeing war is personalized, and the reader is able to experience not
only the facts of the journey, but also, in a limited way, the emotions and
personal experiences of the girl herself.
Tone
Gordimer effectively sets the tone of the story with the
first two sentences: ‘‘That night our mother went to the shop and she didn’t
come back. Ever.’’ In a quiet, dispassionate, almost distant tone of voice,
without a hint of sentiment or pity, the narrator has just reported the
presumed death of her mother. The remainder of the story is told in a similar,
matter-of-fact way: regardless of how despairing her circumstances are, there
is a profound sense of acceptance and fatalism hinted at in the girl’s voice.
At the same time, the sentences introduce the continual sense of loss that the
narrator will experience throughout the course of the story, as well as a
menacing aspect. This will be a stark story, one filled with loss and
foreboding, and the telling of it will offer very little in the way of analysis
or description. One purpose of using this tone to tell the story is to help
underscore the girl’s overall sense of optimism. At the end of the story she
continues to dream of a day she can be reunited, in her home, with her mother,
father, and grandfather. The girl, despite her hardships and her bleak
surroundings, never gives up hope, however illusory that hope may be.
The Ultimate Safari | Historical Context
South African Apartheid
It is impossible to understand Nadine Gordimer’s fiction
without having an understanding of the system of racial segregation, known as
apartheid, under which South Africans lived between 1948 and 1992. Gordimer’s
work, perhaps more than the work of any other South African writer (including
fellow white writers André Brink and J. M. Coetzee), is inextricably linked to
her political views and lifelong resistance to apartheid. With the lone
exception of an early autobiographical work, all of Gordimer’s work addresses
the effect of apartheid on South Africans of all classes and races, so much so
that the Vice President of International PEN Per Wästberg, writing on the
official Nobel Prize web site, calls Gordimer ‘‘the Geiger counter of
apartheid.’’
Briefly, apartheid was a system of laws set up by the South
African government designed to control the movements of the majority, non-white
population. The laws dictated where blacks, Indians, and so-called ‘‘coloreds’’
could live and work and who they could marry. The purpose of apartheid was to
allow the minority white population, which comprised less than 20 percent of
the population, to consolidate political power and control over the majority
population.
As liberation movements during the 1960s and 1970s spread
through Africa, many colonial powers lost
control of their power bases and were forced to cede power to blacks. South Africa
remained the lone exception, and until civil unrest began to spread through the
country in the late 1980s and effectively undermine the government’s control
over the black population, the South African government continued to exert its
political hold. However, the liberation movements throughout the continent
spread to the South African borders, with Mozambique
and Zimbabwe
being transformed into black-controlled, leftist governments. As a defensive
mechanism designed to keep the ideas of liberation and equality from being
spread through its own black population, South
Africa financially and militarily supported rebel groups
in the border areas of Mozambique
and Zimbabwe;
throughout the late 1970s and 1980s the rural populations of those countries
suffered through the effects of guerilla warfare. Entire villages were
uprooted, and refugee camps made up of civilians fleeing the war were
established along the South African borders.
This is the political and military background to ‘‘The
Ultimate Safari.’’ The narrator’s family are, by all accounts, nonpolitical
rural peasants who are forced into the war. The father is presumably killed in
combat, and though the mother’s fate is less clear, it is presumed that she was
kidnapped or killed by the rebel forces. After a series of rebel raids that
have left the villages destitute, the narrator’s family, along with other
members of their village, are forced to make the long trek through Kruger Park
to one of the South African refugee camps.
Censorship and the Works of Nadine Gordimer
As part of the efforts to control its black population, the
South African government strictly controlled the news and dissemination of
information during much of Gordimer’s writing career. The press was either
state-run or state-controlled, and severe measures of censorship were taken to
control the information coming into and going out of the country. An outspoken
critic of censorship, Gordimer saw several of her works banned upon
publication, including her novel Burger’s Daughter, which was banned as
a result of the Soweto
uprisings. Because of this publishing climate, many of Gordimer’s novels and
stories, including ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ and several other of the stories
that make up the collection Jump and Other Stories, were published in
Great Britain and the United States before being published in her native South
Africa.
Ironically, for several years following the demise of
apartheid in 1992, Gordimer’s 1981 novel July’s People was banned in a
South Africa school district for being ‘‘deeply racist, superior and
patronising. . . .’’ The ban, which also affected several other notable works,
including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was eventually lifted after hundreds of
writers from around the world protested, but not before Gordimer publicly
compared the school board to the censors of the old apartheid regime.
The Ultimate Safari | Critical Overview
Because it was released shortly before Gordimer was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jump and Other Stories, the collection
in which ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ was published, is not considered to be one of
Gordimer’s major works. Nonetheless, the book received widespread reviews in
the major media of the day, and several reviewers remarked specifically on the
story itself.
John Banville, writing in the New York Review of Books,
wrote that the story, one of the ‘‘three fine stories’’ in the collection,
‘‘fairly quivers with angry polemic, yet achieves an almost biblical force
through the simplicity and specificity of the narrative voice.’’
Writing in America,
Jerome Donnelly writes that the collection as a whole achieves a ‘‘unity’’ that
is ‘‘remarkable’’ considering the multiplicity of voices Gordimer uses, and the
‘‘simple, controlled narrative of wonderment filtered through a mind too
unknowing to be terrified generates powerful understatement,’’ and that the
story moves on ‘‘without indulging the temptation to sentimentalize the
moment.’’
The Spectator critic Hilary Mantel described
Gordimer’s new stories as having ‘‘complexity and resonance, sometimes
grandeur,’’ and that they are all ‘‘worth reading and re-reading.’’ She
describes the new work ‘‘as trenchant and committed as her novels,’’ and the
sentences of ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ as ‘‘stripped down, simplified. . .
. ’’
Dan Cryer, on the other hand, in a review for Newsday, suggested
that while much of Gordimer’s work had made her ‘‘Nobel Prize–worthy,’’ it was
important to separate Gordimer’s ‘‘superb novels’’ such as A Sport of Nature
and The Conservationist from works such as Jump and Other
Stories. ‘‘The majority of these stories,’’ Cryer writes in reference to
several of the collections stories, including ‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’
‘‘achieve the limited objective of bringing the headlines to vivid life.’’
Critic Jeanne Colleran, in an essay included in the
collection The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, discusses Gordimer’s
views that a short story collection, in many ways, is more able to convey the
multiple truths of South Africa than a novel due to its ability to represent
‘‘the even greater multiplicity of voices, attitudes, and constituencies that
comprise South African society. . . .’’ While much of the collection, with the
‘‘obsessive image of recent South African history, the dead . . . children [that]
haunt the collection,’’ portrays the dire legacy of apartheid, ‘‘The Ultimate
Safari,’’ written through the eyes of a young black southern African girl,
offers some hope for the future. The girl, despite her refugee status, fully
plans to return home where she believes her missing mother and grandfather are
waiting.
In a major critical review in the Journal of Southern
African Studies titled ‘‘Jump and Other Stories: Gordimer’s Leap
into the 1990s: Gender and Politics in Her Latest Short Fiction,’’ University
of the Witwatersrand professor Karen Lazar contextualizes the collection with
respect to South Africa’s political climate at the time, as well as Gordimer’s
previous work. In particular, Lazar is interested in exploring the trajectory
of Gordimer’s political thought, particularly the evolution of her views of
women.
While Lazar believes that the collection shows that
Gordimer’s political thinking has continued to evolve, Lazar finds her
continued representation of women as tending more to the ‘‘uni-dimensional’’
relative to her treatment of men, and that ‘‘various aspects of South African
womanhood [in Jump and Other Stories] are split off, dichotomised and
assigned to individual figures, such that the representations of women tend to
be truncated, reduced and static, giving women a marginal and decentered status
relative to the more lively and layered status of men.’’ While in many respects
Gordimer ‘‘jumps’’ into the 1990s with this collection, according to Lazar,
Gordimer’s sometimes ‘‘static’’ and ‘‘truncated’’ representations of women
continue to be a concern.
The Ultimate Safari | The Race of the Narrator
White
is the publisher of the Seattle-based literary press, Scala House Press. In
this essay, White argues that Gordimer’s decision not to reveal the race of the
narrator in ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ resulted in the creation of a more
empathetic character with whom her white American and British readers could
identify.
The art of ‘‘writing in voice,’’ or ‘‘writing in character,’’
is a common literary technique that has been used by countless writers over the
years. In one of literature’s most famous examples, Herman Melville adopts the
persona of Ishmael, an itinerant seaman, in Moby Dick, and in two of the
more popular examples from the late twentieth century, Alice Walker, in The
Color Purple, adopts the voice of Celie, an uneducated, abused southern
girl, and Arthur Golden writes from the perspective of a Japanese geisha in Memoirs
of a Geisha.
While it is not at all uncommon for a writer to take on the
character of someone outside his or her own economic and social status, as Walker did, what is far
less common is for a writer to adopt the character of a different ethnic
background or race, as was the case with Golden. And least common of all—perhaps
because of the highly contentious and politically charged nature of black-white
relationships— is when a white writer adopts the voice of a black character, as
Nadine Gordimer does in her short story ‘‘The Ultimate Safari.’’
In ‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ Gordimer, a white South African
writer well into her sixties when the story was published, takes on the voice
of a young nameless black refugee girl from Mozambique. While Gordimer had
written from a black perspective several times throughout her career, what sets
this particular story apart is the fact that through most of its telling, the
reader is not made fully aware of the narrator’s race. While the few details of
the story’s setting and the narrator’s circumstances that are offered from the
outset hint strongly that she is black, it is not until the story’s final
scenes that the girl’s nationality and race are confirmed. Gordimer’s conscious
manipulation of these facts is one of the techniques she uses that ultimately
gives this story its poignancy. By keeping the reader uncertain about the
girl’s background, Gordimer effectively holds out the possibility in the
reader’s mind, on some level, that the narrator could be ‘‘the girl next door’’
and not simply another distant and nameless African refugee. While this may
seem insignificant to the overall meaning of the story itself, in light of the
fact that the vast majority of the story’s readers at the time of its
publication were not only white, but also non-South African, this technique
effectively helped Gordimer to maximize the empathy the story’s readers felt
for the character and effectively contributed to her agenda of enlightening the
world to the dehumanizing effects of her country’s system of apartheid.
Throughout most of her fifty-year career, Gordimer has used
her writing to explore, expose, and oppose South Africa’s long-standing system
of racial segregation known as apartheid. With the major exception of her early
autobiographical work, The Lying Days, nearly all of Gordimer’s fiction
in some way addresses apartheid, so much so that fellow writer and the
Vice-President of International PEN Per Wästberg, writing on the official Nobel
Prize web site, calls Gordimer ‘‘the Geiger counter of apartheid.’’
Officially struck down in 1992 after nearly 50 years as the
government’s official policy of racial segregation, apartheid—the Afrikaner
word meaning ‘‘separateness’’—was a system of laws that effectively stripped
all South African blacks of their citizenship rights and was instrumental in
maintaining white control over the majority black population. However,
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as countries across Africa regained their
independence from Europeans, the South African government, fearing that their
recently liberated neighbors such as Zimbabwe
and Mozambique
would encourage liberation movements in its own country, responded by
financially and militarily supporting the efforts of rebel groups to
destabilize those countries. These desperate measures to protect the apartheid
system, which often took the form of military raids into the rural border
areas, resulted in the long-term displacement and deaths of millions of
southern Africans over the years, with an estimated million deaths accounted
for in the Mozambique civil
war that was fueled by South
Africa. Fleeing from their war-ravaged
homes, many villagers who survived the war in Mozambique ended up as refugees in
any number of the South African refugee camps.
A related piece of historical information that should also be
kept in mind when reading ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ is that, because of her
public opposition to the government, coupled with the overtly political themes
of her work, many of Gordimer’ stories and novels were banned in her own
country at the time of their publication; as a result, the first readers to
most of Gordimer’s work were usually not South African but rather British and
North American. ‘‘The Ultimate Safari,’’ in fact, was first published in the
British literary journal, Granta before being published in book form by
American publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the collection Jump and
Other Stories. It is with these facts in mind that the techniques Gordimer
uses in ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ can be best understood.
‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ is written in a deceptively simple
style. The story’s first two sentences— ‘‘That night our mother went to the
shop and she didn’t come back. Ever.’’—not only set the mysterious and
foreboding tone of the story that is about to be told, but they effectively
announce Gordimer’s style as well. The sentence structure and diction are
simple, yet not so simple as to indicate that the narrator is a person of
lesser intelligence or capabilities. The narrator speaks in plain, everyday
English; there is nothing remarkable in terms of vocabulary, syntax, or dialect
that would indicate her to be anything but an English speaker of ordinary
intelligence and sensibilities. She does not speak in dialect; she could be
from any number of Englishspeaking locations. And Gordimer leaves few
idiosyncratic clues that give her racial, cultural, or ethnic identity away.
Aside from knowing that the story’s author is South African,
there is little to indicate at the outset of the story that the narrator
herself is from the region. She tells us immediately of ‘‘the war’’ and of
‘‘the bandits,’’ and she references her ‘‘village’’ and the ‘‘bush’’—both of
which would hint at an African setting of some kind—but because the overall
tenor of the narrative voice is anything but African, it is easy to overlook
these clues at first reading. As the story progresses, the girl gives us
further clues as to the setting with her description of the ‘‘dried mealies’’
her grandmother boils for her and, most importantly, her family’s journey
through Kruger Park, one of South Africa’s popular game parks. Within a few
pages, then, we have come to understand that she is in fact from southern
Africa, but the overriding sense, as indicated by her narrative voice, is that
she is a proper English-speaking girl, and the reader can’t help but wonder, on
some level, what this girl is doing wandering as a homeless refugee in South Africa.
Of course, since Gordimer writes in English, and her audience
mostly comprises English readers, her stories must also be written in English.
It would make no sense whatsoever were ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ to be written in
the girl’s native tongue. But when taking on the voice of a character,
especially when that voice’s ‘‘true’’ voice is non-English, the writer usually
provides the reader with early clues as to the narrator’s background—whether
explicitly through a remark by the narrator or implicitly through his or her
choice of diction.
In the case of Moby Dick, for instance, the book’s
very first sentence—‘‘Call me Ishmael.’’— announces the identity of the narrator,
and very shortly thereafter Ishmael describes his background and the reasons
for his pending journey. In The Color Purple, Celie speaks in a southern
black idiom that leaves no question as to her racial or regional identity. In
Gordimer’s story, until the final scenes in the refugee camp, the narrator
provides few clues as to her race or ethnicity. It is in the refugee camp that
the narrator finally confirms that she is of African descent, even if the
details as to which tribe she belongs are left out. ‘‘The people in the village
have let us join their school,’’ the narrator says,
‘‘I
was surprised to find they speak our language; our grandmother told me, That’s
why they allow us to stay on their land. Long ago, in the time of our fathers,
there was no fence that kills you, there was no Kruger Park between them and
us, we were the same people under our own king, right from our village we left
to this place we’ve come to.’’
Yet even here, when she references ‘‘our language,’’ the
possibility still exists that she is referring to English, and that perhaps
this narrative is taking place in a world turned upside down, in a mythical
future where the (white) English-speaking families are forced to wander the
continent as refugees, and where their land has been carved into artificial
political boundaries that separate people of the same tribe and ethnic
backgrounds from one another. This possibility is eliminated, however, in the
story’s final scene when the narrator describes the ‘‘white people’’ who have
come to film the refugee camp (implying, of course, that the refugees are not
white), and we are told with certainty what her nationality is when a reporter
asks of her grandmother, ‘‘Do you want to go back to Mozambique— to your own
country?’’
While Gordimer has always been committed to her writing as a
form of art, and not simply as a tool to advance her politics, she has also
always been unapologetically committed to using her writing to advance her
antiapartheid stance. With her readership being made up of mostly, though not
exclusively, British and American whites, and by giving the narrator many of
the qualities that a typical young white English or American girl would
have—she is observant, articulate, intelligent, selfless, and emotionally
even-keeled—Gordimer created a character with whom readers could empathize, but
not necessarily pity. Ultimately it is not pity that Gordimer wants to elicit
from her readers, but rather she wants her readers to come to a profound
understanding of the human toll of apartheid. Holding off until the last
possible moment before revealing the girl’s race has the effect of giving her
white audience every possible reason to feel for the girl as ‘‘one of us,’’
rather than reasons to feel sorry for the miserable conditions of yet another
poor anonymous black African. In other words, by effectively creating a
character who closely resembles her readers, or who at least resembles people
with whom her readers were familiar, Gordimer gave her audience the vicarious
experience of what it was like to be, or know, a refugee, even if for a brief
amount of time.
It should also be noted that, in order for the story to pass
as a work of art, and not merely political propaganda or journalism, its
narrator must remain true to her character. The fact is that most ten-year-old
girls, regardless of their backgrounds, would not necessarily consider their
race or ethnicity to be important in the telling of their stories. Race,
nationality, and ethnicity are adult constructs that children become aware of
to varying degrees over time, so Gordimer’s decision not to have her narrator
discuss those issues was as much a decision to create a believable character as
it was to create an empathetic one. However, the effect of that decision,
regardless of its design, was to create an empathetic narrator.
In one of her more famous essays, ‘‘Living in the
Interregnum,’’ Gordimer paraphrases Mongane Wally Serote, a black South African
poet: ‘‘Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen.’’ By taking on
the voice of a young black refugee girl, and by offering her readers the
possibility that her voice was not simply ‘‘black’’ but also ‘‘universal,’’
Gordimer not only created a black voice that whites could more readily listen
to, but she also opened a window for her readers into one of the ugly rooms of
apartheid.
Source: Mark White, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Ultimate
Safari,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2004.
The Ultimate Safari | A Feeling of Realistic Optimism
In
the following interview, Gordimer discusses her political affiliations and
views as well as her more recent works.
[Karen Lazar:] Nadine, I have some questions to ask you
about your involvements as a citizen during the 80s and early 90s, and then a
few questions about your more recent work.
In the
early 80s, what stirred you to become more deeply involved in political
organisations? Which groups were you specifically involved in? I know about ACAG (Anti-Censorship Action
Group), but wondered about your other organisational commitments at that time?
[Nadine Gordimer:] What spurred me was a new
opportunity to be involved. In the 70s, we had the separatist movement, Black
Consciousness, which I understood and sympathised with. There were some whites
who were hurt or incensed by it. Even the writers’ organisation, PEN, at that
time blackled (under the leadership of Mothobi Mutloase but with a non-racial
national executive), broke up because of the BC movement. It didn’t break up
acrimoniously, though it was seized upon by the popular press as having
entailed a terrible row. This wasn’t so at all. We just decided that we
wouldn’t carry on as an organisation. The black members had had some pressure
brought to bear upon them: we felt that this was not the time for small
gatherings of like-minded people of this nature, that it was rather the time
for the consolidation of blacks.
Then, of course, in the 80s, the situation changed. I, like
many others, had been in the position where there was no organisation with a
public profile that you could belong to, unless you wanted to belong to the
Progressive Party, as it was called at the time, or the Progressive Federal
Party, as it became. So there were liberal organisations that you could belong
to, but nothing to the left of that if you were leftinclined. So I was
homeless, so to speak, as a social being. I had, of course, my attachments to
the African National Congress (ANC) which I’d had all along, but it was
underground. But then, with the formation of the non-racial United Democratic
Front (UDF) in 1983, you could openly avow yourself. So I think that was a
great encouragement. Here was some sort of organisation to which I could attach
myself, which I did, and I met and worked with some wonderful people.
And COSAW (The Congress of South African Writers)
formed later in the 80s?
Yes, COSAW formed later. But COSAW too became possible out of
the new climate, the feeling that apartheid wasn’t made of granite, that it was
crumbling, that there was some kind of attrition from within. The UDF surviving
without being banned was proof of that. And there was a more confident mood
among blacks that it wasn’t necessary to maintain this total separatism. The
time was right to start a national writers’ organisation, so we called together
all cultural groups concerned with writing and aspects of writing, including
theatre, and had a meeting. Out of that came the Congress of South African
Writers.
So that is really how my involvement moved. Running parallel
with that I was also becoming more and more involved with the ANC, especially
with its cultural side. I was one of the people who went to Botswana to the
Culture and Resistance festival, as many of us did. Somehow things were really
beginning to move. I also had quite frequent contact with Wally Serote
overseas, when he was running the cultural desk of the ANC from London.
During the 80s were there any particular and decisive
political events—perhaps trials, funerals, assassinations—which might have
shaped your decisions as a writer? I’m thinking, for instance, of your
portrayal of Whaila’s assassination in A Sport of Nature and of the
graveside scenes in My Son’s Story—those kinds of scenes in your work.
Well, the graveside scenes came out of my own several
experiences of funerals, one in particular when I experienced teargas for the
first time. So that came out of what was going on at the time and my own
personal experience of it. What had made me think of Whaila’s murder is the
assassination of David Sibeko. I had known him virtually as a kid, an
adolescent, when he was on the telephone exchange at Drum magazine; he
first worked there. Then he became active in the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).
He was extremely bright and very charming, and he rose steadily in the
hierarchy of PAC. He was one of the people
assassinated abroad in the 70s, so that was somehow at the back of my mind.
It’s interesting how these assassinations first of all took place outside the
country—it’s a mystery why during that period they were not taking place
inside. Now political assassinations in the last few years have taken place
inside the country.
I wondered what had been decisive for you, because for me,
Eastern Cape
leader Matthew Goniwe’s assassination in 1985 was a totally decisive event.
Perhaps one is ripe at a certain point for a consciousness shift.
It’s true, and that event can haunt you. Other events start
becoming part of a general category after that.
Moving to the censorship side of things: a Johannesburg advocate
mentioned to me that you frequently took part in representations to the
Publications Appeal Board on behalf of other writers during the 80s. Which
literary texts did you appeal on, and on what grounds?
I can’t remember the details, but there were quite a large
number of texts we appealed on. I was there as a member of the Anti-Censorship
Action Group, and ACAG would naturally have chosen a writer if it were fiction
in question, a journalist for a banned edition of a newspaper, and so on. So
it’s quite true that I was called upon, and went, a number of times.
What were your impressions of the Appeal Board, especially
coming out of your experience of the banning of Burger’s Daughter?
Well, that was really very interesting. They were
unbelievably polite and positively smarmy. One of the accusations I had made
again and again concerned not only the whole principle—I always started with
the principle—but also the incredible lack of qualification of these members of
the board to make decisions. Members of the Appeal Board would sit facing us,
and there was an old retired schoolmaster from Witbank or somewhere, and a
retired dentist at one point, I remember, making decisions like this.
I think one of the texts we appealed on was probably Don
Mattera’s Azanian Love Song, a book of poetry, and there were many
others.
In the records of the mammoth Delmas Treason Trial of
1986–9, you testify to the peaceful and legitimate nature of the UDF. Your
support for the still exiled ANC and your understanding of why the organisation
was forced into violence also come through in your testimony.
That was the real purpose of my testimony. It wasn’t so much
the UDF because most of those on trial were really ANC people. I suppose we can
talk about it now. I had been involved in that trial because Terror (Patrick)
Lekota was writing a book in the form of letters to his daughter. I was
smuggling out bits of it with the help of the lawyers and then going over it
with a friend who did a wonderful job of typing it out. I knew the trialists
well, particularly Terror and Popo (Molefe).
Did Terror’s book ever come to light?
The book did come to light. It was published by some little
publisher. It’s a pity. It sank like a stone. The interesting thing about it: I
would have thought that the idea that came to Terror was inspired by the
letters to Indira Gandhi by her father. But he’d never heard of them. It just
came to him out of his situation. There were problems because he wasn’t near a
library and couldn’t research or verify the dates or names he couldn’t
remember. So we did our best with that but it wasn’t strong on fact. But it was
interesting because it was one of the attempts to write from the people, to see
history from the personal point of view rather than from the historian’s point
of view.
That was my initial access point to the trial. It is
customary for the accused to give the names of people they would like to speak
for them in mitigation. I was one of the people that they asked for. And I was
then very nastily questioned by the prosecutor. I was not used to this. He
asked . . . quite bluntly, was Nelson Mandela my leader, and then he said is
Umkhonto we Sizwe your Umkhonto we Sizwe? And I said yes. So I suppose in a way
that was a watershed in my political development.
Have you, yourself, written anything about the Delmas
trial?
No, nothing. Actually it’s interesting. I’ve been to a lot of
political trials over my lifetime but I don’t think there’s a trial in any of
my books. Trials are just natural good theatre, aren’t they?
If they aren’t very tedious.
They can be, yes. But they can make good theatre if you know
something about them.
Nadine, when did you actually join the ANC?
Oh, the moment it was legal. You couldn’t join before. What
you did meant you were with it or not with it. The moment it became possible to
do so, a friend and I went down to JISWA which was the Johannesburg Indian
Welfare Association (at that time run by a friend of mine, Cas Saloojee and his
wife Khadija) because we were told that this was one of the first places where
you could get your ANC membership card. So we went down there. He is a good
friend, Cas Saloojee, and we were his first two members. That was the end of
February 1990.
A few more questions about your perceptions of left
politics in the 1980s. In My Son’s Story, Sonny gets marginalised by his
comrades in ‘‘the movement’’ for reasons which are not made entirely clear.
When did you become aware of splits in the Congress Left, and what splits were
you aware of? Is Sonny’s ‘‘movement’’ to be associated unequivocally with a
UDF/ANC alignment?
Oh, I think so in response to the latter. It was clear from
the kind of things he was doing. The tensions, the splits are there in every
political formation and it doesn’t require any great feat of imagination to
concoct something with these things. And I’d already done it before on a
different scale in A Guest of Honour.
At that stage in the late 80s or in the time that My Son’s
Story was being written, did you ever believe that any other liberation sectors
might come to centrality within South African politics?
Such as?
Perhaps worker sectors, PAC, alliances of other
kinds? The reason that I ask is that I’ve noticed the pervasive way in which
you use the definite article in that novel: ‘‘the movement’’, suggesting that
there is no other.
I used the definite article because, to me, the movement did
encompass others. I specially didn’t want to make it specific. Of course there
was certainly the SACP and the ANC and the rising Trade Union movement that
were already allied. Although there was no official recognition of this, they
were working together. A very significant development for me in the 80s was the
recognition of black trade unions. I can’t imagine that we would have moved as
we did without the worker power. In my youth in that mining town, Springs, the
miners were even kept out of the towns. They were so completely cut off from
any normal kind of concourse with people in the town (I’m talking about black
townspeople too). And then in the 80s I would go down to Braamfontein to the
post office or the bank, and out of the National Union of Mineworkers’ offices
there would come these young men in their T-shirts striding down the pavement.
It was to me such a graphic illustration of a huge change. So the Trade Union
movement opening up was also important to my thinking. That was clearly
encompassed under ‘‘the movement’’.
I think that somehow, the underlying conflict seemed to be
between the UDF and the movement: the more direct political forces, ANC, PAC,
SACP and so on. I anticipated the kind of thing that happened between the
returning ANC exiles and the UDF people in my book My Son’s Story.
Later, when the exiles did come back, one saw people who had done such
wonderful work being somehow set aside or getting minor positions.
Did you have any direct contact with FEDSAW (Federation
of South African Women), FEDTRAW (Federation of Transvaal
Women) or other women’s orgnisations during the 80s, or with the documents and
speeches emanating from these organisations?
I always received the documents and quite often went to
various functions but I was not an active member at all.
Many feminist reviewers and interviewers, including
myself, have attempted to draw you out on your opinions of feminism in recent
years. Your description of feminism as ‘‘piffling’’ in the early 80s was
followed by your recognition that there are some ‘‘harder, more thinking’’
kinds of feminism in the later 80s. What is your opinion, now, of the role that
a political feminism may have in our current moment of governmental and
constitutional change?
My views have changed, and they’ve changed because the
situation has changed. It’s interesting. I can’t see any vestiges now of that
trivial feminism that I was talking about so disparagingly in the early times
because I think it deserved to be disparaged. A tremendous division arose in
the mid-70s (about ’76) between the concerns of white women and the concerns of
black women. I’ll never forget the attempts of Women for Peace, which was a
good idea although it came out of a ‘‘White Lady Bountiful’’ thing. They did
have some meetings and some sort of contact with black women. It was based on
the idea that we all have children and what happened in ’76 was a threat to
children.
But what happened then was that, come November, all these
white adolescents were preparing for the matric dance and what was happening in
Soweto or
Gugulethu and all over the place was that black women were running behind their
kids with bowls of water and lappies to wash the teargas out of their
eyes. There was really no meeting point for these women unless the white women
had directly challenged the government, which they were not prepared to do. You
can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something
harder. I’m not saying that compassion is not necessary in our lives but you
can’t change a regime that way. I think that’s one of the faults of a worthy
liberal organisation like Women for Peace. At least you could say that the
women had moved along that far but I couldn’t see how there could be any common
feminism unless white women had truly thrown in their lot with black women, as
some of the members of FEDTRAW later did.
And now? What do you make of the gender politics of the
current moment?
And now, I think the proof is there. We’ve got quite a lot of
women in Parliament. We have got in place of a white male Afrikaner (which
we’ve had for generations) a black woman as Speaker. She’s also, significantly,
a South African Indian which is for me a true demonstration of non-racism.
Nobody said she isn’t black enough or if they have, I haven’t heard it. And I
don’t think they have said it. I think she is recognised for what she is. And
then you have other people like Baleka Kgotsisile and Cheryl Carolus who are in
high positions. And there are a number of others. Barbara Masekela is now going
to be our ambassador in Paris,
and as you talk about it you can think of other names. So they are all evidence
of a very important kind of feminism from my point of view.
Another thing I’d like to say is that in the interim
Constitution, the strong emphasis on no discrimination on grounds of gender is
a very important step of the right kind now. They’ve brought that up on a level
with discrimination on grounds of colour or race.
And you think there’s the will to enact that?
I think so, certainly among younger black women and some
white women.
Nadine, a few questions on your work. When one looks at
some of your portrayals of leftwing or activist women, one can see a kind of
physical type coming across. I’m thinking of Joy in ‘‘Something Out There’’ and
Hannah in My Son’s Story, both of whom are depicted as sloppy dressers
and sexual improbables when compared with your more conventional beauties such
as Hillela and Aila. Is your depiction of this ‘‘alternative’’ female aesthetic
(the Hannah/Joy kind) based on something you’ve observed in leftwing circles
over the years, or could you suggest where it might come from?
Oh, of course. These are things that come from observation. I
think we all fall into some kind of uniform. I remember years ago arriving in America— I was going to some meeting at Columbia—and I was put up
in a sort of residential complex where we were all writers and painters and
artists. And it was a year when if you were a writer or painter, you wore black
trousers and a black polo-neck sweater and you wore a certain kind of earring
and you would not wear another kind. And one day I looked at myself and
thought, you’re wearing the uniform. So I think this observation comes from
simply living among people. Just like the sweater- and-pearls aesthetic: it
isn’t true of everyone, but it does define a certain kind of woman, doesn’t it?
Some critics have commented that your most recent novel,
None to Accompany Me (1994),is surprisingly sombre in mood, given the largely
triumphant political period from which it emerges. Could you comment on this?
Well, I think there’s a certain solemnity when, after a long,
long time, extraordinary good things happen, when things open up. Sometimes in
the last year, I think we’ve all had what one might call a sense of awe. And I
think this probably comes out in that book.
Your portrayal of the consequences of violence, as in
Oupa’s death in your latest novel, seems to me to be more sustained than in any
such portrayals in earlier works.
Yes, because such events became so terrible in view of the
fact that we were coming to the end of this struggle against the apartheid
regime. You know it’s rather like, in war, soldiers being killed while the
armistice is being signed somewhere else. It pointed to the tremendous waste
that took place over years and years and years, and also to the mindless and
criminal violence that has come about in this country as a result of poverty
and the conditions of apartheid. So in a way, the prolonged attention to Oupa’s
death, the whole process of his dying, really encompasses many deaths.
Your protagonist in this latest novel, Vera Stark, moves
towards a recognition of the fundamental solitude of the ‘‘self’’ as she grows
older. At the same time, she withdraws further and further away from sexuality,
such that her relationship with her final male companion, Zeph, is a celibate
one (even though he is still sexually active—with younger women). Could you
perhaps comment on why Vera’s eventual life choices are coterminous with a
sexual removal from the world? And what might that say about the ageing process
for women in our society? Does it exert different stresses on women than it
does on men?
There’s a different attitude to women’s sexuality than there
is to men’s. It’s still not recognised in the way that men’s is.
By whom?
By everybody. By other women too, by conventional women. Vera
is a strange woman because in some ways she is conventional. She attacks her
daily work. Even though it is unconventional work, she goes about it in this
rather strict, direct, authoritarian way. She doesn’t seem to belong to any
women’s movement. She’s a women’s movement in herself, I think. And she bluntly
asserts her sexuality. She even quotes Renoir at one point—‘‘I paint with my
prick’’. But she has her fill of sexuality, and she works her way through it.
She’s had a very active kind of sensual life and hasn’t cared too much about
the morality of it.
So you don’t see any loss when she moves away from
sexuality?
No, it’s a conscious decision. You’ve said something that
many other people miss: they say how lonely she is, but you’ve said she
recognises the ultimate solitude of self. If you’re going to make a journey
towards that, towards accepting that, then you are shedding some things along
the way. She sees the baggage of her life as something which she took on and
wanted and wouldn’t have been without, but she doesn’t want it dragging around
with her forever.
And sexuality might have been part of that baggage?
Yes. And of course, who can say? People’s sexuality dies down
at different ages. Some people seem to be finished with sex in their
mid-forties, or fifties. Terrible! Others take on lovers, both male and female,
at seventy. It’s a matter of the glands, I suppose. Vera genuinely doesn’t want
another sexual relationship and doesn’t resent the fact that Zeph has his
little pleasures on the side.
I notice some of your work (stories and sections from
novels) have been published over the years in the glossy women’s press, such as
in Cosmopolitan, Femina and Fair Lady. What is your impression of these
magazines?
Well, I’ve always had very mixed feelings. Quite frankly I
don’t read them, though I see them around. But I notice, through the kind of
contents they splash on the covers, that they have changed quite a lot. Also
you see black faces on the local covers these days. Admittedly, they’re usually
beauty queens. I haven’t seen any of our black women writers or actresses on
these covers. But, you know, that is the women’s magazine culture: to be a
beauty queen is the ultimate ambition. It’s rather interesting that women have
to be very consciously feminist in order to reject the whole beauty queen
thing. I suppose quite a lot of young women do get quite financially independent
through modelling.
Incidentally, what do you make of the ANC coming out in
support of something like the ‘‘Miss South Africa’’
contest?
I suppose this is the kind of thing that political parties
do, and the ANC is now a political party. If people say ‘‘This is part of the
emancipation of blacks’’, I have no objection to it. It’s a little thing. I’m
much more worried about us becoming nice big arms dealers.
Nadine, are you a television watcher, and were you
watching South African TV and its represention of local politics during the
80s?
No, I never watch it. I’m a newspaper reader.
What newspapers and journals did you subscribe to or read
during the 80s, and are you still reading those papers?
During the 80s, the usual local English-language ones (I’m
afraid my Afrikaans isn’t up to much), and of course the alternative press: Weekly
Mail, New Nation, etc. And then, literary journals such as New York
Review of Books and so on. For a long time I used to get The Observer and
then The Independent, and then it just got too much. In recent years,
once The Weekly Mail started printing pages from The Guardian, I
thought that will do.
As for local cultural journals, Contrast comes to me
and Staffrider of course (I was involved in that journal in COSAW) and now
and then, The Southern African Review.
Finally, the mandatory question. Now that we are past South Africa’s
first democratic election, what are your impressions: of the pace of change, of
the receptiveness of South Africans to this change?
I’ve been pleased, I should say surprised by the
receptiveness of South Africans. I think the crisis of expectation which
absolutely obsesses people overseas—I can’t tell you how many times in America I got
questioned about this—is not called for. In my experience, my small experience
of talking to grassroots people, and from what I gather from those who do have
a big experience of it, what people want is truly basic. I think this has been
recognised now in the ANC. It’s not recognised by the press, it’s not recognised
by people who saw April 27, 1994 as the beginning of the millennium. People are
not asking for Mercedes Benzes and big houses. You know what they’re asking
for: a roof over their heads, electricity, education, jobs.
That is nonetheless a tall order for a new government.
It is a very tall order, of course. As for how much has been
done, of course it seems too little but one can’t say a start hasn’t been made.
I think the question of how much can be done how quickly should be explained to
the black majority in a different way from the way that it is being explained.
When dissatisfaction comes up along the lines that the ANC has bent over
backwards to placate whites and done nothing for blacks, I think Mandela
answers that very well but he doesn’t go into it enough, from my point of view,
when he says the placating of whites has cost nothing, that no money has been
spent on it. What money there was has been spent on providing electricity,
water where it’s been possible. . . . This is great. To me it’s progress. It’s
not spectacular but it’s progress.
What should be explained much more fully, and is not, to the
black majority is the reason why whites have to be soothed and kept in place:
because the government, ANC-led, does not want any abandonment of our very
complicated economic infrastructure here, such as you saw in other parts of
Africa, while there is still insufficient black skill to take over such things.
So if there are too many concessions to whites, in terms of tax or keeping them
in a certain measure of control of various boards, it could be explained that
this is only because you cannot move towards greater prosperity and development
without using them. In other words, whites are being used, and they should
accept it; we should all accept it. Whites have got things that blacks never
had, and they are now being used to help provide these things for others. Of
course there’s also the question of investment from overseas. And this is not
put clearly enough to blacks. If you look at material concessions to whites,
what have they been? Nothing, except that white life has been left intact. Also
people tend to ignore the quiet, slow (too slow) integration of schools. As far
as I know from white and black friends, the kids are now going to school
together and there’s no problem.
So my feeling is of realistic optimism. Of course, new
hitches arise all the time. I turned on the radio at lunchtime, and now the
farmers on the borders of Lesotho
whose cattle are being rustled have made counterattacks and burned down cattle
kraals in Lesotho
where they say their stolen cattle have been housed. I heard one of the farmers
say that, unless this rustling over the border is stopped, there’s going to be
bloodshed. Also, a year ago, who would have thought that we would have the
problem of illegal immigration which we now have—that we’d have Koreans selling
watches in the streets, Zaireans talking French in the streets. Who would have
thought this? It’s something we couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Why do you think this has happened to the extent that it
has? Is it that we are seen as a place of bounty or safety relative to these
other countries?
Oh absolutely, but we can’t afford this. We must think of our
own people first, and somehow this has got to be stopped. Of course, this ill
becomes somebody like myself who comes from immigrant stock. All of us who are
whites here originally do. So who are we to say that the Koreans must be kicked
out?
Most
whites come from immigrant stock a very long way back.
Precisely,
but do you think that really makes such a difference?
I notice that some critics writing for Jewish journals and
papers claim that you have denied or suppressed your Jewish origins and your
family’s immigrant history.
Well I think it’s truly based on nothing. I have never denied
that I’m Jewish and I’ve no desire to deny it. For me, being Jewish is like
being black: you simply are. To want to deny it is disgusting. It’s a denial of
humanity. There’s no shame in being black and there’s no shame in being Jewish.
But I’m not religious, I haven’t had a religious upbringing, and whether I’m an
unbeliever in terms of Jehovah or Jesus Christ to me is the same thing.
Being black in our society surely amounts to a more
politically disadvantaged state than being Jewish, for most people anyway?
Yes, of course, much more. I wonder how these Jewish critics
feel about Joe Slovo and others, who’ve put something else first. I’ve never
seen any criticism of them. I’m not sure why it’s happened to me! Perhaps
writers are always easy targets. In America I’m asked, do you think
your Jewish background has influenced you politically? I’ve thought about it a
lot, and I think not. I would hate to think that you have to be Jewish in order
to understand racism, just as I would hate to think you have to be black to
understand it. It should be something absolutely repugnant and quite impossible
for anybody who is a real human being. So, to say I’m not Jewish so I don’t
care about the Holocaust or I’m not black so I don’t care about Sharpeville or
all the other Sharpevilles that followed . . . that’s appalling.
There are strange little ethnic loyalties, I suppose, that
come up. I can’t help being pleased, and have been pleased over the years, to
think that in South Africa’s liberation movements and progressive circles there
have been a really disproportionate number of Jews, given the smallness of the
Jewish population. I’m rather proud of this. Though of course, you may then get
the accusation, as you do in America,
that Jews dominate progressive thinking and the press, and so on. So it can be
used as a stick to beat you with as well.
Source: Nadine Gordimer with Karen Lazar, ‘‘A Feeling of
Realistic Optimism: An Interview with Nadine Gordimer,’’ in Salmagundi,
Winter 1997, pp. 150–65
